Here’s a scene that may sound familiar. A crowd surges through the streets, chanting and shouting, eyes blazing with moralistic fervour.
While the police stand limply by, the mob turns its fury on a statue. They rock it on its plinth, their excitement reaching hysteria, before at last it comes crashing down.
But they’re not finished yet. There are other statues to topple, other images to destroy.
I don’t want to live in a country where the police stand idly by while crowds hurl statues into the river. I don’t want to live in a country where vandalism and violence are perfectly justifiable, as long as they’re in the service of the latest fashionable cause
There’s the statue of the old war leader in the capital, the statues outside the ancient universities.
Everywhere you turn, there are relics of the past, symbols of the ancient wickedness. All must be brought down, if society is to be re-made.
So began the Cultural Revolution, the terrible, blood-stained period in the late 1960s, when mobs of self-appointed ‘Red Guards’ rampaged across China.
For ten years, Chairman Mao’s followers burned books, tore down statues and murdered millions loyal to the ‘Four Olds’ — old ideas, culture, customs and habits.
They will say that by striking a blow against racism, they were doing the 21st-century equivalent of God’s work, and that only a hardened sinner would dare to question them. But I don’t want to live in a country where mobs rampage through the streets, tearing down anything that ‘offends’ them
It was so traumatic that even now Chinese news outlets are banned from discussing it.
The thought of such scenes erupting here in Britain would have seemed utterly fantastical — until this weekend.
But this is what happened in Bristol on Sunday, when a screaming mob toppled a statue of the slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston.
Vandalism
That was merely the beginning. Over the weekend, statues of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln were vandalised in London.
A Black Lives Matter protester tried to burn the Union Flag at the Cenotaph, monument to the fallen world war heroes.
For ten years, Chairman Mao’s followers burned books, tore down statues and murdered millions loyal to the ‘Four Olds’ — old ideas, culture, customs and habits
And in Oxford, the Rhodes Must Fall movement has crawled back out of the woodwork, demanding the removal of the statue of the Victorian empire-builder Cecil Rhodes.
Amid the hysteria, it’s easy to forget this all began with the dreadful killing of a black American man by a white policeman some 4,000 miles away.
But it is one of the tragic ironies of the past few days that, amid the orgy of vandalism, poor George Floyd’s fate has been almost forgotten.
The battle for our history has been raging for several years. As a historian, I have always been opposed to the campaigns to tear down our statues, which stand as everyday reminders of the layered complexity of our national past.
I have written on these pages about Cecil Rhodes, and how none of the men and women memorialised in stone was morally perfect. And in any case, moral perfection is an ideal, not a reality.
It is true Edward Colston, who lived from 1636 to 1721, made much of his money from the slave trade — as did many Britons in his day.
We also know that he was a great philanthropist, endowing numerous schools, churches, hospitals and alms-houses in his native Bristol.
We inherited our statues from our predecessors. And one of the reasons to study history, to me, is to understand that people in the past were different from us. Not better. Not worse.
Just different, with attitudes and values that often challenge our lovingly polished principles.
So instead of arrogantly smashing our historical inheritance, we could perhaps show a bit of humility, and use it as an opportunity to learn.
Over the weekend, statues of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln were vandalised in London. A Black Lives Matter protester tried to burn the Union Flag at the Cenotaph, monument to the fallen world war heroes
I realise, of course, in today’s climate of feverish intolerance, any talk of learning from the past is tantamount to pulling on a Ku Klux Klan hood and venturing out to burn crosses.
Yesterday, for example, the high priest of self-satisfied sanctimony, the LBC radio presenter James O’Brien, issued a stern ruling.
‘How you feel about that [Colston] statue is how you feel about slavery,’ he declared on Twitter. ‘Don’t let anyone pretend otherwise.’
This is just not true. Like any other decent person, I find slavery abhorrent.
But I loathe the idea of the likes of O’Brien roaming our town centres to tear down images of people whose views they consider ‘inappropriate’, to use one of the cant words of our age.
Who are they to decide what statues can and can’t remain? Is every mob with a grievance allowed to tear down images it finds objectionable?
Would it be all right for a crowd to demolish the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square, on the grounds that he once said the typical African was ‘only one degree removed from the animal’?
Of course not — as repellent as those words are. We live in a democracy and as both Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour leader Keir Starmer argued yesterday, that isn’t how British democracy works.
Frenzy
If you find a statue offensive because of the words or actions of the individual it represents, you campaign for its removal. Work hard to recruit supporters and win the argument.
But you don’t whip thousands of people into a frenzy of self-righteous anger and tear it down yourself. For what then makes you different from Mao’s Red Guards?
At the root of this campaign is a colossal fantasy about human nature, an infantile belief in pristine moral innocence. Most sane adults know that all great men and women had flaws, just as all nations have their guilty secrets.
Yet these hard-Left campaigners believe that by tearing down the relics of the past, they can wipe the slate clean and start again. They are like medieval fanatics who thought if they banished every trace of worldly sin, they would be able to build heaven on earth.
In this respect, the activists stand in a long, strident, blood-soaked tradition. They are heirs to the Jacobins in the French Revolution, who tore down all symbols of their monarchy, renamed their months, introduced decimal weeks and rebooted the entire calendar, with 1792 becoming Year I.
We all know how that experiment ended: with the guillotine, the Reign of Terror, the rise of Napoleon and slaughter of millions. Yet the urge to smash and burn, to demolish the corrupt past so a perfect future can rise from the ruins, has never gone away.
This was the rationale behind the cruelties of the Russian Revolution and the hysteria of China’s Cultural Revolution. And in its most extreme example in the 1970s, it was the justification for the horrors of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.
Noble
Under the aegis of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge believed if they purged every trace of Western imperialism, from speaking foreign languages to wearing glasses, they could restart the clock at Year Zero, and build a ‘purified’ nation.
In their own minds, they began with noble intentions. They ended by killing almost two million people, a quarter of their entire population.
No doubt the weekend’s protesters will find such a comparison deeply offensive.
They will say that by striking a blow against racism, they were doing the 21st-century equivalent of God’s work, and that only a hardened sinner would dare to question them.
But I don’t want to live in a country where mobs rampage through the streets, tearing down anything that ‘offends’ them. I don’t want to live in a country where the police stand idly by while crowds hurl statues into the river.
I don’t want to live in a country where vandalism and violence are perfectly justifiable, as long as they’re in the service of the latest fashionable cause.
And I don’t want to live in a country that treats its history as an opportunity for juvenile, narcissistic posturing, and turns its ancestors into caricatured villains.
And I’m prepared to bet that you don’t, either.
Amid the hysteria, it’s easy to forget this all began with the dreadful killing of a black American man by a white policeman some 4,000 miles away. But it is one of the tragic ironies of the past few days that, amid the orgy of vandalism, poor George Floyd’s fate has been almost forgotten